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> selecting first is a preposterous mixture of a delicate ballet and sledgehammering it home.

Double declutching is a lost art, it seems.

It involved moving the shifter into neutral, revving the engine still in neutral, and clutching and shifting into the gear when the RPMs were "right". Skilled double-declutchers could shift nearly as quickly as ordinary drivers with syncromesh.

Common in older cars when I was young, in the proterozoic.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_clutch_(technique)



When I was 14, a family friend from church decided he needed help around his sizable property. He figured the easiest approach would be to teach me to operate his machinery and come over on weekends to work with him. He got brush cleared and I learned to operate, among other things, a farm tractor from the 1950s. I learned the combination of finesse, force, swearing, and prayer needed to shift such a beast. When I started driving my first car, an old Buick Century with an automatic, it almost felt like cheating.


You can do a similar thing in motorcycles by rev-matching, this way you don't even need to pull the clutch to switch gears.


In fact in my old manual I got so good at matching revs I could just not use the clutch at all except moving from stand still


I certainly have to double clutch to go down into first since it doesn't have a syncro, but that's a pretty rare need. Even selecting first from neutral while stationary is a challenge.




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